Meet the minds behind all that climate change data

Julia Cole finds evidence of the climate record in some fascinating places. Cole is a geologist at the University of Arizona. Most recently, her research has led her deep inside a limestone cave 50 miles southeast of Tucson. Preserved there, within stalagmites that have formed on the floor of the dark, perpetually humid cave, is what Cole calls “a robust archive” of climate history in the desert southwest. The stalagmites contain an almost continuous climate record that dates back tens of thousands of years to the last ice age, a time when ice sheets covered much of North America. Subtle …

Scott Luthcke weighs Greenland — every 10 days. And the island has been losing weight, an average of 183 gigatons (or 200 cubic kilometers) — in ice — annually during the past six years. That’s one third the volume of water in Lake Erie every year. Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet offers some of the most powerful evidence of global warming. Luthcke is a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He specializes in space geodesy, a branch of earth sciences that monitors Earth from space by measuring changes in the planet’s shape, orientation, and gravitational field. Lutchke …

It takes a certain kind of person to gather ice cores from remote glaciers, cart them back to a lab, and unlock the clues they contain about the climate record. Such a person needs to be hardy and skilled enough in the field to lead expeditions loaded with equipment into some of the world’s most rugged-and frigid-mountain terrain. Back at the lab, this person needs technical acumen and a meticulous attention to detail in order to measure the cores’ trace chemicals down to the parts-per-trillion level. To be a glacial detective, in other words, a person needs to be a …

Keith Cherkauer studies mud. It’s a dirty business that has revealed a lot about global warming. As he trudged through rural Indiana farmland earlier this spring, Cherkauer, an agricultural and biological engineer at Purdue University, paid close attention to the way his boots sank more than an inch into the mud before they reached the solidly frozen soil below. The way surface water travels under these soil conditions fascinates Cherkauer — and worries him too. For the past decade, he has been monitoring soil temperatures and patterns of freezing and thawing in the upper midwestern region of the United States. …

Camille Parmesan studies the effects of global warming by chasing butterflies. Sounds fanciful, but it is anything but. Her careful field observations of butterfly populations have produced compelling evidence of how climate change has already affected our living planet. In several landmark studies, she has helped pave the way for a body of eye-opening research that has tracked changes in numerous populations of plants and animals. It all started back in the early 1990s, when Parmesan was a graduate student happily studying the diet of the Edith’s checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha). She was drawn into the field by her love …

Spring certainly seems to arrive earlier these days than it used to. But is it a sure sign of global warming or just natural variability? After decades of careful research on wildflowers, University of Maryland ecologist David Inouye has some definitive — and disturbing — answers. This summer Inouye returns to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory for the 40th consecutive year to study changes in wildflower populations some 9,500 feet high in the Rocky Mountains near Crested Butte, Colo. His work offers some of the most detailed understanding yet about climate change and its effects on alpine plant and animal …

Warren Washington literally wrote the book on climate modeling. Introduction to Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling, which he co-authored with Claire L. Parkinson in 2005, is the classic graduate-level text in the field. A former head of the American Meteorological Society and an adviser to every president — Republican and Democrat alike — since Jimmy Carter, Washington has devoted his life to creating increasingly precise and accurate computer models of Earth’s climate. “What people need to understand is that these are not untested models scientists have dreamed up,” says Washington, now a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). …

Exactly how much did the sea level rise three million years ago? Okay. Probably not a question you’ve asked yourself lately. But the question and, more importantly, its answer are significant. They will help scientists understand how fast and how high our current sea levels are likely to rise as today’s global warming trend melts the remaining ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Fortunately, there are researchers wrestling with the problem. Chief among them is Maureen Raymo, a paleoclimatologist at Boston University. Raymo heads a multidisciplinary team that is spending its second summer digging for evidence in the desert of …

How do we know that human activities are responsible for warming the planet? Because just like criminals, climate change culprits, such as smokestack or tailpipe emissions, leave behind distinctive signatures or patterns. All climate investigators have to do is look closely enough, and hardly anyone has been looking longer or more carefully than Benjamin Santer.

Inez Fung is on a mission to find and account for every gram of heat-trapping carbon dioxide on the planet. And she knows where most of it is hiding.

If you’re one of the tens of millions of people who live in the southwestern United States, get ready for drier weather. That’s the message from Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observa

CO2 has acidified the oceans, and marine biologist John Guinotte says that spells trouble for coral reefs and for the marine ecosystem as a whole.

Thomas Knutson studies storms and his research predicts that global warming is likely to mean fewer, but stronger Atlantic hurricanes.

Julienne Stroeve shows how dramatic changes in Arctic sea ice are occurring right now — with enormous consequences for the whole planet.

Bethany Bradley probes the link between climate change and “alien invaders.” The climate scientist studies weeds such as kudzu and purple loosestrife.

Most people are understandably confused about the relationship between global warming and natural variability in the weather. After the huge snowfalls in the northeastern United States over the past few months, for instance, many people can’t help but wonder: With a winter of such magnitude, how can scientists say the planet is warming? Day-to-day and seasonal weather fluctuations present challenges not only for the public but also for climate scientists trying to tease apart the relationship between long-term climate change and weather variability. Wenhong Li, an atmospheric scientist at Duke University, studies precisely this link. Her latest research on precipitation …

How much carbon is being released by the thawing of the Arctic’s so-called permafrost? Ecologist Ted Schuur braves Alaska to find out.